Year: 2008

  • Blog Post

    Evel Knievel, corporate positioning & corporate message development – a new Velocity white paper

    Velocity today announced a new white paper for technology marketers facing corporate positioning and corporate message development problems…

  • Blog Post

    Evel Knievel, corporate positioning & corporate message development

    Engineers take the leap from tech features to Big Business Benefits like Evel Knievel approached the Snake River Canyon: they fall down. Our Hierarchy of Benefits gives you a better way to do corporate positioning and corporate message development. It provides a practical solution: the Bridge (or, for the Tarzan in all of us: the Vine).

  • Blog Post

    The Benefit Hierarchy in corporate positioning & message development

    People believe the unimportant things you say and disbelieve the important ones. You need ‘vines’…

  • Blog Post

    Spamalot to the Holy Grail: a personal email journey

    Are you a spammer? I’m sure you’re not. But I’ll cheerfully wager that some of you have, at one point, been confused for one.
    According to the BBC, undercover US researchers, or white hat spammers, have finally unearthed the secret economics of a 21st century boogie man: the junk mailer.

  • Blog Post

    Your new content may not be as relevant as your old

    All the best B2B tech marketers are mini-publishing houses — they never stop cranking out thought-provoking content on the issues their target market cares most about. But even the best thought leaders often follow a simplistic content promotion strategy that completely ignores the idea of a sales cycle. Basically, they pump out some new content, promote it, and repeat. What they’re doing is burying the best under the newest…

  • Blog Post

    A really good newsletter

    We know we ‘big up’ Pär Almqvist, the Marketing Dude at VNL, quite a bit. But we thought you’d like to see what we consider a really, really good eNewsletter that Pär briefed in and designed (we wrote it for him).

  • Blog Post

    Cisco gets gold star for daring to do it differently

    As a marketing company, we spend a lot of time trying to get attention for our clients’ latest gizmos. That’s why we applaud Cisco’s latest product launch teaser campaign.

  • Blog Post

    Microsoft’s baffling “I’m a PC” campaign

    Apple got a lot of attention with its “PC vs Mac” commericals. They were simple, funny, well-scripted and seemed to capture the essence of what Mac people love about their Macs. Clearly, they got under Microsoft’s skin, because the crack Seattle Rapid Response team has leapt into action (what, three years later?) with an expensive riposte: the “I’m a PC” campaign. The result is wrong in so many ways, I can’t summarise them all in a blog post.

  • Blog Post

    Because you’re worth it

    Why are so few B2B companies as good at naming things as consumer companies? B2B could learn a lot from beauty companies like L’Oreal, which uses naming to great effect.

  • Blog Post

    Branding as body language

    A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday. He’s Axel Chaldecott, co-founder of HHCL, now the top creative on the global HSBC account at JWT. The article’s central metaphor is that a company’s visual identity is its body language…

  • Blog Post

    I beg you: don’t bore the bejesus out of me

    Marketing is communication. B2B marketing is bad communication.
    That’s how your audience thinks about everything you put out.
    Their expectations couldn’t be lower. They’ve waded through thousands of case studies and brochures and web pages from people just like you and IT’S NOT FUN.

  • Blog Post

    Tech marketing trapped in Plato’s Cave

    For 2000 years we’ve been told to research and change or suffer the consequences. It’s still an issue today. Learn how one of the biggest names in the tech has been reminding itself of the danger of following processes rather than customers.